Many server environments known in the art execute multiple instances of the same application simultaneously. Each of the application instances may maintain a separate area within a file system. The area within the file system may contain application resource files used by the application instance. Furthermore, the application resource files may contain configuration information used to configure the application instance. Application resource files may also be runtime files or data files.
In some environments, all of the application instances have identical configurations. Thus, the application instances may share common application resource files. Furthermore, the file system area for each application instance may contain symbolic links whose destinations are the shared application resource files. Symbolic linking is a technique known in the art wherein attempts to access data via a path which is the origin of the symbolic link cause data located at a path which is the destination of the symbolic link to be accessed instead. Thus, each application instance may beneficially access the shared application resource files without the need to create a separate copy of each resource file for each application instance.
In other environments, one or more application instances require customized configurations. Such application instances may require modified versions of the application resource files. The modified versions clearly cannot overwrite the original versions because other application instances may require the original versions. Thus, in some systems known in the art, shared application resource files requiring customization are copied to the file system area for the application instance requiring the customized version of the resource files.